IoT DDoS Attack On DYN

Following the news of the DDoS attack on Dyn, Jeremiah Grossman, Chief of Security Strategy at SentinelOne and Mike Hanley, Director at Duo Labs commented below.

Jeremiah Grossman, Chief of Security Strategy at SentinelOne:

 “Because DNS is vital to every person, business and website across the entire internet for system stability and performance, online businesses commonly outsource DNS management to third-party providers who have better and more reliable infrastructures to operate on behalf of their customers. Historically, this has worked to everyone’s benefit. However, what we’re now seeing is that in light of the way the infrastructure works in the security landscape, they are attractive targets for large-scale DDoS attacks – because if you take out one of these DNS service providers, you can disrupt a large number of popular online services, which is exactly what we’re seeing today. Given the drastic increase lately in the size and scope of DDOS attacks, DNS providers are scrambling to increase bandwidth capacity to withstand the latest attacks. That’s why we have these providers – they do it so that the rest of us that use them don’t have to incur the cost of doing so.”

 Mike Hanley, Director at Duo Labs:

“This is analogous to ransomware attacks in the healthcare sector in a number of ways – attackers use attacks that are relatively cheap and most likely to force payment of ransom (or force some other change in the victim’s behaviour) in exchange for ceasing the attack.  In more traditional hospital ransomware attacks, attacks are successful because devices are often relatively less secure and the victims cannot tolerate outages of systems used to provide life-saving services.  In this case, attackers are leveraging the low cost of subverting poorly secured IoT devices (connected cameras, etc.) at scale and hammering their targets with traffic rates we’ve not previously seen before.  Attacks on DNS providers are particularly damaging given that DNS is so critical to how we navigate the Internet today.  This is part of the cost to the security of the Internet when devices are shipped to millions of consumers after little or no attention to security during their development and no promise for timely delivery of security updates.”